Defamatory Cinema

This sickening place, which I shall not identify, had something really unusual: a full set of lenses, a large screen, and adjustable masking! It was at this cinema that, at age 28, for the very first time in my life, I saw Academy 1:1.375 projected! The film itself was MovieTone 1:1.18, and so it was cropped, but hey, this was closer than I had ever seen it done before! I was so impressed that I asked for a job, and I got it! As soon as I got that job, I added the MovieTone 1:1.18 and Silent 1:1.33 apertures at my own expense. There was enough flexibility for me to get the images on screen rather easily.

Soon, several of the crew got excited by my ideas, and so we all pitched in and converted the machines to run variable speed. (More on this below.) When I projected MovieTone and Silent films properly, I was almost convinced that this had not been done anywhere on the planet since the early 1930’s. I was wrong, of course: UCLA and the Orpheum in downtown Los Ángeles could do as much, and did. There were probably a few others, maybe one in NYC, maybe one in London, probably two in Paris, certainly one in To Hell You Ride, but probably nowhere else.

When I first started at the Defamatory Cinema, before we made the Silent conversion, every movie that arrived was Dolby A optical stereo, and they all sounded lovely. (This is all coming back to me slowly. I mostly misremembered in my previous iteration of this anecdote.) Then we got A Fish Called Wanda, which was monaural. No prob, I thought. I switched the Smart Stereo processor from STEREO to MONO, but it didn’t work. There was no sound at all. I ran to the house tech for help, since he was the one who had installed the Smart Stereo processor. He then confessed. He had never ordered the monaural card. He didn’t see any urgency to do so, since every movie that arrived was Dolby A stereo. He told me to play the film back in stereo, and it was TERRIBLE. The volume was distorted. Soft sounds were boosted, loud sounds were softened. He ordered the card, but it didn’t arrive until more than a week later, after the monaural film had left. (By the way: Odd how he installed the stereo processor on the old sound rack. Wires were dangling everywhere. The wires all ran to a connector plate that belonged to a different rack, and which didn’t fit. So that old connector plate just dangled. Had I had a lot of money, I would have hired a professional to reinstall everything, but I had no money at all.)

Later on, in the middle of a movie (I don’t remember which or when), the surround channel failed, and the auditorium was filled with disturbing noise. That was beyond my abilities, but the house tech was standing right next to me. He had taken the advanced course in the Smart Stereo system, and he got it under control within a few days. That is when I made up my mind that having only a single sound rack is a mistake. Every booth should have two, one reserved as an emergency backup.

Most Hollywood movies at that time were framed for 1:1.66, but there were still quite a few framed for 1:1.85, and at least one, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, that was shot at the full Silent aperture but framed for a 1:1.75 crop, and it was cropped that way in the lab (the preview was MovieTone open-matte, though). That situation led to another movie that drove me nuts: My Stepmother Is an Alien. My memory was that it was shot entirely with the full Silent aperture and was printed MovieTone 1:1.18. Nothing unusual about that. Very common. As I had it on the inspection bench and mended the usual 5,348 bits of damage, I noticed that it was quite obviously framed for a 1:1.85 crop. Zo, I ran it at 1:1.85, and it looked perfect. I didn’t watch the movie (no time, and it looked pretty dreadful), but I checked it frequently, and it looked perfect — until right near the end. Three gods were sitting in a cloud, and I nearly screamed. That one shot, and only that one shot, was framed for a 1:1.66 crop. Blast! Fiddlesticks! Dagnabbit! That was an effects shot, created by the effects crew, and the effects crew apparently forgot to check how the rest of the movie was being shot. Showbiz. What is it I say about showbiz? I switched to 1:1.66 in time for the second show that night. As for the change-over that occurred in mid-action and mid-music, well, I did the best I could, but there was no way to make it seamless.

Oh heck, I don’t remember when this happened or what movie was playing, but one night, a carbon-feed motor failed. I got it fixed after the show that night. I don’t remember what was wrong. I don’t remember how I fixed it. (I have a vague memory that a spring had gotten distorted and wasn’t feeding the carbon brush properly, and that I was going crazy searching for a replacement spring. Maybe I’m just confabulating that, though. Oh heck. I also have a vague memory of some wires having been somehow sheared, and that I then replaced them, with what spares I don’t know, but maybe that was at the Sunset? After all these years, memories get fuzzy.) What I do remember about that one show is that, for every alternate reel, I got a taste of what projectionists in the early teens and prior had to go through, feeding the two carbon rods by hand, every few seconds, and adjusting them up and down and side to side constantly, to force an even burn. When the change-over bell would ring, I had to push the two rods too close together and just hope that the light wouldn’t burn out before the next reel was on screen. That is not a job I would ever want to repeat.

Another prob. One Saturday night, the #2 arc kept dying, every few minutes. Some guy in the auditorium shouted out, “GET A NEW BULB!” I recognized that a rectifier was failing. That was beyond my level of expertise. Fortunately, the electrician was sitting just outside my door, watching the movie. After the show, we crawled into the rectifier room and he pulled out the diodes. He looked at them and realized that we were going to have a problem. The casings were hermetically sealed. He couldn’t just order new diodes, he would have to order entire new encased diodes, which was a special order, and those prices were sky high. I looked at one of those diodes and I had my doubts. I suggested, “Hey, well, since it’s dead, why not see if you can pop it open?” He didn’t think that was possible. I urged him to try it. He stuck a thin screwdriver inside the top hole and merely tapped on it, gently. The unit fell right open. The diode inside cost only a few dollars and was easily available at any electronics shop. He saw that the outer casing was simply pressed together, not sealed, and he could press it back together by hand. So, the next morning he bought a bunch of diodes. Hooray! Problem solved. Oh how I love it when people who are smarter than I am sit right next to me and work together with me. That’s how I learn!

A silly prank I pulled at the Defamatory Cinema: For a few days, we ran National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, which was framed, if memory serves, for a 1:1.85 crop. Parts were shot at 1:1.375, and parts were shot with the full Silent aperture. I noticed that the shot of Nicolette Scorsese emerging from the swimming pool just happened to be printed as MovieTone aperture. And right at the very bottom of the frame was some attractive anatomy that would otherwise be cropped out, even in VHS. I ran the film at 1:1.375, and when we got to the pool scene, I cranked the framing knob up to get the very bottom of the frame on screen. So, the five or ten people who ever attended those showings got to see some pleasant imagery they had never seen before and will never see again.

Ah yes. Another little prank I performed occasionally. Ernie at Donald Pancho’s once told me, chuckling, that he had received a print in which the shipping bands were spliced onto the film and punched with sprocket holes. I thought that was hilarious. So, at the Defamatory Cinema, I sometimes did that. I found where the last frameline would have been on the tail and spliced the shipping band to it. My personal 8-perf Ciro with adjustable pitch was the only splicer I ever used, and whenever it made a splice, it perforated not only the tape, but anything in its path. I often wondered what the next projectionist thought of that. Oh, these little jokes that the audiences could never possibly know about.

I should also mention that it was at the Defamatory Cinema that I made the two dumbest projection mistakes I ever made. The embarrassment is permanent. Since I was new to Peerless Magnarc, I over-oiled the carbon-feed motors, and, worse, I oiled a part of the lamp mechanism that should never be oiled. I could never find an instruction manual until after I made those stupid mistakes. Live and learn. That was Mistake Number One, but it was fixable. It was a painful, tedious, difficult lesson, but it was fixable, and we fixed it.

There was another mistake, and there is a story behind it. A relief projectionist had just been hired, and as soon as I mentioned the name, a friend uttered, “He’s bad news.” My friend was right. I shall call this new guy BadNews. BadNews, with a booming voice that drowned out the movie, with a proud and confident smile forever plastered onto his face, loaded a reel onto projector #2, but did not first wind it down to the appropriate footage mark. To advance the film to that footage mark, he jogged the motor and then slammed the brake. “Don’t do that!!!” I exclaimed. “Turn the flywheel by hand!” “Okay,” BadNews thundered, as he jogged the motor again and immediately slammed on the brake. “Please! Don’t jog the motor! Don’t hit the brake! Just turn it by hand!” I demonstrated. “Okay,” BadNews thundered, as he jogged the motor again and immediately slammed on the brake. “NO!!!! I TOLD YOU NOT TO DO THAT! DO NOT TURN ON THE SWITCH!!!!! DO NOT SLAM THE BRAKE!!!!!” “Okay,” BadNews thundered, as he jogged the motor again and immediately slammed on the brake, all the while with a gigantic confident smile plastered to his face. Jog brake jog brake jog brake jog brake jog brake, and on and on he went until he got the marked frame at the aperture. I was a nervous wreck. To put this into perspective: Suppose you buy a brand-new car, and, as you drive it home, you slam the gas pedal all the way to the floor, and then immediately slam the brake all the way to the floor. And then you slam the gas pedal again, and then you slam the brake again. Every second, you alternate: gas pedal, brake, gas pedal, brake, gas pedal, brake, gas pedal, brake, gas pedal, brake, gas pedal, brake. By the time you get your car home, will it work anymore? I cannot even imagine what BadNews did to those machines when I was not looking. Whatever he did, it was terrible.

Suddenly, the Simplex E-7 picture head in machine #2 was falling to pieces. I stripped it down almost to every last nut and bolt, replaced a bunch of parts, and pieced it back together. Unfortunately, once I got it back together, the next show was run not by me, but by BadNews. After BadNews’s show, the #2 picture head was entirely seized. Why? Nobody had to explain it to me. The Simplex E-7 has a little “one-shot” oiling mechanism. I had explained to BadNews exactly what had been explained to me, and what had been explained to everybody. When you start a movie, press the “one-shot,” and when you change to the second reel, press the “one-shot.” Once a movie, each machine needs that “one-shot.” You have to do that. If you don’t do that, the gears don’t get lubricated. “Okay,” BadNews thundered, as he continued to wear his gigantic confident smile. BadNews didn’t press the “one-shot.” I don’t think he ever once pressed it. He got away with that earlier, because the gears were all lathered with oil to begin with. After my day-long service, though, the gears were no longer lathered. They needed the “one-shot.”

The house tech and I wondered what we could do, and I had an idea, which was a long-shot. Maybe we could drive over to another cinema, a few miles away, which I happened to know had a spare E-7 sitting on the booth’s floor. As soon as I said that, he leapt into his car and drove us both other. We darted to the cinema and I knocked, hoping someone was inside so early. Yes! I asked if I could chat with the projectionist, whom I knew by name. I explained our predicament, and the projectionist said he could also loan us a Brenkert. “Brenkert?” I said, drooling. The house tech, with a smile, explained, “He likes Brenkert.” No, I decided, I did not have time to learn to service a Brenkert. Let’s just stick with the E-7. Agreed. I carried it and got ancient black pasty oil all over my clothes. We drove it back, I looked at it, and I realized it was not ready to hit the screen. We had a Saturday kiddy matinée to run, and what were we to do? I hurriedly mounted the kiddy show onto 6,000' reels, ran to the stage, made an announcement to all the mommies and daddies and kiddies, who were totally perplexed as to what on earth a disheveled person who looked like a homeless bum and with dirty black grease all over his clothes was doing on stage. “Announcement. There will brief intermission half-way through. We’re having a disaster in the booth, and we’ll need a moment to change reels.” Nobody understood a thing I said, but that was okay, because at least they did not complain to management when I stopped the show half-way through. I went through the loaner E-7, and not only was it filthy, not only was all the oil sticky and gummy, but the shutter shaft had been lubricated with lithium. I had to take the loaner almost entirely apart, clean it piece by piece, and then get it running for the evening show.

A few days later, the machines sounded horrible. They were binding, they were moaning, they were whining. What was wrong? We were running North by Northwest, and the machines were coughing up blood. Right at the very end of the second-to-last reel (projector #1), about half a second before I made the final change-over, the machine slowed and entirely froze. It sounds like I’m making that up, doesn’t it? By what wild coincidence would it freeze exactly at the last moment of the penultimate reel, to prevent a shutdown? Well, that is just one of those bizarre coincidences. Why didn’t it fail a few seconds earlier, or a few minutes earlier, or an hour earlier? Why did it fail exactly at the moment of the final change-over? All I can say is that my life is filled with coincidences such as these, coincidences that seem to defy all laws of probability or chance. You don’t believe me, but I am telling the truth, and you still won’t believe me. Fine. I lost a night of sleep as I disassembled the #1 sound head. The bronze gear was entirely chewed. This was indeed bad news, caused by BadNews with his endless routine of jog, brake, jog, brake, jog, brake. The gear box was filled with scoops and scoops of bronze filings, and it was not easy to clean them all out. Every time I thought I had finally cleaned them all out, I spotted a few more hidden away in various niches. Fortunately, we had spare bronze gears, and I ordered two more right away, just in case. The sound head in projector #2 had the same problem. I wanted to kill BadNews.

Oh, and a few nights after he chewed the gears, BadNews cleaned out the picture and sound heads at the end of his shift, which was routine. This time, though, he neglected first to remove the lenses. The degreaser he sprayed into the heads etched its way into the antiglare coatings, and the lenses were then forever frosted. I wanted to kill him again, and he could not understand why. “Just cool it, man! It’s okay! Take it easy!” BadNews said assuringly, with his big, confident smile, as he patted me on the shoulder to calm me down. When he said that, I wanted to torture him to death. Murder, in this case, was totally justifiable. BadNews was a psychopath. He had zero sense of responsibility, he had zero conscience, he was convinced that he was perfect and that all the rest of us were crazy, he had no clue why people were upset with him, and he was not in the least concerned about it. Nothing would ever go wrong for him, though he left a trail of destruction everywhere he went. Why the owners hired him, and why they kept him on for those few weeks, I do not know. A few days after destroying the lenses, BadNews resigned to take a different job. Good riddance.

I almost never get angry. Really, I almost never get angry. I always say that I’m angry and furious, but, really, my emotions simply do not get that charged. Except rarely. And BadNews provided one of my rare occasions of nearly lethal rage and blood pressure. (I looked him up on the Internet just now. Perhaps what I found was someone else who shares his name, but I think it is he. He is thriving in the business of restoring old buildings. I dread to think of what irreparable damage he is causing to historic structures.)

Since this was the first time in my life I had replaced a sound head’s bronze gear, I did something wrong. The machines were not turning over smoothly. I decided to dig in again and check my work. Now, to get to the bronze gear, first I had to remove the steel drive gear. I pulled on the gear in projector #1, but it was resisting. Why? I couldn’t understand. It was so easy the last time. I grabbed a gear puller and pulled with all my might, pounding at it, and I finally got it out. Then I saw why that steel gear had been resisting: I had neglected to release the set screw. Have you ever felt stupid? I mean, so stupid that you wondered why you were even born? I felt even worse than that. I had to order a new set screw, and, in the course of my violence upon the machine, I managed to crack the stereo solar cell. That was Mistake Number Two. It was my mistake, and I decided I would pay for the repair. I made the mechanical portion of the repair myself. As for the new solar cell, well, that was beyond my training. The house tech installed it and calibrated it, but we could not find a mutually convenient time to meet, and so he had no opportunity to train me on how to replace and calibrate.

I could finally return the E-7 to the other cinema. The projectionist came down and I handed him the machine, as I explained that I had taken much of it apart, cleaned it, and lubricated it, and I told him about the lithium grease. “Never use lithium grease,” I said. He got a look of terror on his face. He desperately wanted to get away from me. He cut off the conversation and dashed away. Hmmmmm. That reminded me of an earlier time. He had shown me around his booth. He was running Ninotchka on Screen #1, cropped to 1:2.00, and he didn’t know the difference. He proudly showed me a junction box on the wall and boasted about this invention to interlock all three machines, so that he could run a single movie on all three screens. He said this was a first, because he had, oh, I don’t remember, maybe an E-7 on one screen, an XL on another, and a Century on the last. Impossible to interlock, he said, but he managed it. I said I was puzzled: “But the sound heads are all the same, and it’s the sound heads that drive, not the picture heads.” He got a look of terror on his face, and he cut that conversation off right there. A few months later, I was talking with the shop steward, who said that he had gotten the same story, and that when he relieved the guy for a shift, he got curious and opened that magical box. It was just a bunch of unconnected wires, nothing more.

The machines, which had been fairly well maintained from the time they had been installed in the 1930’s, were now rickety. The assistant manager, who did not last long at all, taught me how to do more intensive surgery on those machines, and he even taught me how to adjust the intermittent. Ouch! If you do not like tedium, if your patience can wear thin, then never, please, never attempt to adjust an intermittent. It is trial and error, or, rather, it is error times a million before you finally happen to fit the pieces together just right. I spent probably weeks of my life attempting, over and over again, to get them just right. Thank you, BadNews, had it not been for you, I would never have needed to learn that skill.

Why did this assistant manager not last long? Well, the upper managers explained it to us, in hushed tones, confidentially, one by one: The assistant had absconded with a lot of money. I don’t know why, but I thought that sounded convincing. Everybody thought it sounded convincing. I am ashamed of myself. Had the assistant absconded with funds, a remedy would have been legal charges, which were never filed. The management whispered the same rumors about the dismissed treasurer and his wife. Again, I thought that sounded credible. Again, I was a fool to have been fooled. If you want to badmouth me for being so gullible, I shall not stop you. I shall not defend myself. I accept the blame. Especially since I was next in line.

The Defamatory Cinema was selling less than a hundred tickets each week. What to do? I suggested that the managers book Singin’ in the Rain for a week. They agreed, but were nervous about cutting into the regular “profits.” They booked it not for a week, but for a single screening, and on the deadest night of the week, Thursday, when they were lucky if they sold three tickets. To their amazement, it sold over 150 tickets. They were thrilled. They wanted to repeat this miracle. They reasoned that Singin’ in the Rain was a musical, and so obviously audiences liked musicals. So they booked more musicals, and I cringed. They chose Meet Me in St. Louis, Brigadoon, and Carousel, and those movies just died. They died themselves dead. They were dead on arrival. They were dead before arrival. I could have told them that, but they didn’t want to hear me anymore. Audiences like Singin’ in the Rain NOT because it’s a musical. Audiences like Singin’ in the Rain because it’s high-energy, because its characters are charismatic, and, more than anything else, because it’s screamingly funny. It’s a perfect entertainment. The music is nice, and it helps, but that’s not the underlying attraction. I couldn’t explain that, because nobody had ears to hear. The management knew nothing about showmanship. All in all, I chose three movies for the schedule, and all three were money-makers. I had made my point, and I had done my duty. That was enough. They wanted to hear no more from me.

Oooooooo. SATURDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER 2021: I just remembered something else. One of the projectionists and I had been buddies for a while, and so, one day, the board chairman’s dad came up to me to tell me something in a confidential whisper. A few nights before, my buddy was scheduled to operate the follow-spot for some con artist who was pretending to have psychic powers. Ho-hum. That same old fraud, which always sells, and which nearly everybody believes, because nearly everybody falls for those same dumb magic tricks and “mind-reading” tricks that any five-year-old could master. Anyway, that’s beside the point. The board chairman’s dad told me that my buddy had walked out of the booth in the middle of the show, entirely abandoning his duties. I was terribly confused and upset when I heard that. Next time I saw my buddy, I asked him, “What happened during the psychic show?” He told me that, just a few minutes after the show started, the chairman told him that the follow-spot would not be needed for the remainder of the night’s show, and that he was free to leave. So, my buddy pushed the follow-spot back into its corner and wrapped its power cable, and then walked down to the auditorium to watch the remainder of the show. A little while later, the “psychic” on stage asked for the follow-spot, and my buddy’s heart leapt to his mouth. He made a mad dash back up to the booth and patched the follow-spot back in and got back to work. “Ah,” I said, “that’s not the way the story was relayed to me.” We then had a nice talk, and we both decided that maybe it was time to get away from that toxic environment.

Try as I might, the right side of the image was always fuzzy — all machines, all lenses. It drove me nuts. I couldn’t figure out why. I think I now know why, and I think I could now fix it, but too late! I’ll never set foot in that part of the world again. Why not? I’ll tell you why not. You see, I also made Mistake Number Three at the Defamatory Cinema. It was the worst mistake of all, and it was probably the worst mistake of my life: Until right towards the end, I trusted the maniacs who ran that place. More than anything else, it was that horrible cinema that taught me never to trust anybody ever again. I got direct evidence that it had not been the assistant or the treasurer or the treasurer’s wife who had absconded with anything. It was upper management who had done that. Others finally got that idea, too, and so when fingers began to point at the managers, the managers deflected attention from themselves by accusing me of every crime known to humanity. A ten-year-old boy had asked if he could see the booth, and I said No prob, come on up. He was fascinated by the machinery and wanted to learn all about it. Now, mind you, we were never alone even for a minute. The house tech was there, the electrician was there, a plaster-worker frequently popped in, and so did some others. Rarely was I ever alone in the booth, and I certainly was not alone at that time. Every moment of the kid’s visit was witnessed. Right afterwards, something new happened, and it never let up. Whenever I entered for a shift, whoever was up front warned me: “You’re not gonna bring any kids in here, are you?” “Gotta keep the kids safe from you!” “We can’t let you have any visitors to the booth, because we don’t know how old they are!” All of a sudden, I was shunned. Other than the house tech and the electrician, if anybody spoke to me, it was only to tell me off, and in those terms. Among those who shunned me were those who had been right there by my side and who had seen for themselves that nothing untoward had ever happened. Well, something untoward had indeed happened, but I was not a party to it. One of the managers was. It was that manager, I learned, who had started the stories about me, and then almost everybody else simply piled on.

The phone in the booth now received hangup calls. All the time. My phone at home also received hangup calls. All the time. My buddy and I simultaneously resigned from that horrible job. A few years later, when Caller ID service was made available in my area, I subscribed and discovered that the Caller ID did not register those hangup calls. The screen stayed entirely blank. That was certainly a fun prank conducted by someone involved with the Defamatory Cinema, who had apparently purchased a novelty filter to prevent detection. The solution? Easy! If the screen is blank, don’t answer.

Suddenly I got an ad in the mail at home, urging me to renew to The Spotlight, the newspaper of the American Nazi Party, to which I had never subscribed and would never subscribe. I also suddenly started receiving all sorts of hardcore advertisements, too. A police car was stationed in front of my apartment, 24/7, for six months. One day, on my way out, I waved, and the cop got a look of panic on his face, immediately drove off, went around the block, and parked again, right in front of my apartment. It was clear that I was on some watch lists, no doubt. Most likely this was a sting by the Postal Inspectors, as well as action upon a complaint lodged at the city cop shop.